Well, for me, the top three essencial for beginners are freebies, tutorials and challenges. Fortunatelly you can find all three in this site, lol. I think on freebies because you may be not willing to spend to much in a hobby that you don´t know if you´ll keep on or not; tutorials... well, because you don´t know how to do what you want in the beginning. And challenges because they help you focus on goals - At least for me, since the beginning, and until today, challenges help me not to stay for too long thinking on a page (yes, I need deadlines), and inspire me to do fun, variated layouts...